So here's a rather long excerpt from chapter 2 of Lisette wherein Schwender waxes philosophical about inscrutable form in architecture and the history of its erroneous root in number theory as he prepares to explore the short and tragic life of Guy van Menard (forthcoming). To share mind with the claim that from nature’s stir each tower hails and each block comes toothed to such verisimilitudes of its parent as to be near vertiginously undifferentiated – this, a rub which no argument of our own can simply rend, is of a kind demanding truth only in journeys best made with those most sensitive of organs: stippled ridges felt by the hands or strode longwise, at every distance and angle in degrees, by the orbed eye. We should however, save ourselves from the greater weals of direct battle over the above and instead may the following, for the moment, suffice as an exploration: It should be as no surprise to the reader that a person is in no slim mixture with his dwelling, but instead a solution, bound and flush -- like the multi-thousand woven tales of history, the dweller speaks from his dwelling in the manner he speaks from, in example, 1873, perspired slightly, in a short tailed coat and trousers, only the day before he had been perhaps mugged while writing in the same public’s garden where his father, much earlier, had once himself knelt whilst a rehearsed proposal of marriage escaped his bare tremulous chapped lips with a ring, deep-gleamed and onyx-like, held in vice between his thumb and forefinger. Though these things of time are in no way mobile, they can however, like marriage, be proposed or suggested to alter any nuanced continuum in stone; for, we may say, one is prone to the visions of his dwelling, or can not be helped to stumble along after (with bound wrists) down some path of future tales specific to them; architectures may wax long on what came before or was, but similarly hold as much ease (and indeed, their steepest strength) in the depiction of what will or should be by design and to make those positions so by the even simple statement of marked trees along a lake’s scored brim or a solitary hole bore out’ the ground amidst a city market. The great emperors of Rome knew well the stories they sought sewn amongst the people in their works, them being as an ark posits into buoyant fact a world not yet imagined or necessary. The campus of the Forum Trajani and its hived markets, them both given their resplendent breadth by Apollodorus, made long scripture of the Dacian Wars and its proud players’ strides in victorious battle after battle; the sinuous marble of Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli and the pompous whims spun throughout it’s asymmetrical bed, bore with little shame the last brightest years of the empire; the palaces of the Tetrachs, their reliquiae mauled blunt by oblivion, in their block-walled, bristling crouch reflected, by contrast, both a certain bitter end and a bitter begin[2]. Did they not all bear rings to some lover (of the ‘to dwelling’), and could a lover dare refuse such chaunted vows as those that already would be so? And in solemn moment submerged, they two lovers would, with knuckles woven; with their four palms pressed fast in ready; each twin a synecdoche pregnant with the other and same-ly leaned with ogive lengths toward their edges doubled to a kiss – a pyxis, them and like sabers come to meet in a perfect point at quaking mouths. Once met with sweet pressure they become flushed with blood and do conjoin to bloom a lungless manse of body where buried beneath resides that only closed canal through which each flows the other breathless, oneiric. Does a phrase pass within this kiss between lipless throats? These words, made only in a jaw, windless trying, ejected beneath tongues: “but to be lost…” Indeed, but to be lost. The old clergy, in penance, (though beleaved from the squalor of their subjects, wreathing God’s perfect grace or rather carving it out the sky), gave altar to that most ultimate tithe of those certain chapels known to us whose thousand-tined folds would endless rake standing the fairest brick-births of the Gothic – the most bejeweled and dwarfing prayers they were, but a vesper’s humble blow of breath can beyond strain scarcely finds the ear only nearest lent: such an analogy is of great significance in considering the absence of theory and plan during the Gothic, as its forge in the oblivion was cause still of a single grave bane since it was after the Romans fell among the barbarians’ squall that the lysis of the written page and the literate faculties to read them roosted a boot-leaden foot, but for God’s scriptoriums, upon the backs the people, pinning them plagued mute to the dry soil, damned,; they having little recourse but to toss their stories into the thin air before them, hoping for all but to catch flight from spontaneous wings formed on the feet of any other common man. And like prayers, the stories and reasons of their days and buildings lived immobile lives and traveled only as long any man could repeat them in such a sad span as any man has; the workshops, schools and beds of most discussion were the forges themselves, the vast pits of tackle from which those zealous, boiling sheaths of chapel were mysteriously wrought, with secrets traded only among the knowing and the willing. It is, for these reasons, there is little that is known about the medieval architect’s thoughts or practice. And though their ways remain undiscovered, it is obvious that formed reason grew to learn from its own life which, in turn, rested upon itself in some earlier iteration. This much we may extract even in the absence of concrete theory until such period where the path is found again and to that we would owe a behumbled valedictory in memory of Alberti and for his gift to the builder’s passion. And we may imagine him clearly, clamoring backward fourteen-hundred years to deliver the golden wafer of ‘VITRUVIVS’ once again upon the tongues of the slackened, languid guilds of Europe; and no augured leaves could have spelled the future so much as a calendared treatise that an ‘Ancient’ had written; and gilded it was, coating their mouths in its precision and luminescence. “If in dictate, all, then no man will be to bow and scribe…” says the good Herodotus and therein is emerged our ward of doom; that is to say, even our good century has seen, in part, its own shared tales fraught to a crook by successive movements seeking coup. And once usurped, they become subsequently braided over upon themselves, not unlike an ouroboros: it was none other than Pugin (and to degrees, his son) that would sing the panegyrics of an historical diaspora to the Gothic for all of London, and throatily, to instill anew (and yet originate) what is the imminent morass of the dark ages -- its wake, in many ways, ebbed not enough that we may walk unstung still through along our own shore -- and while such revisionist plots may seek a moral ground for their inceptions, the stuff of their want is not always beyond grasp (though take care to accompt that the whole of French medieval history can be already found in all its blazonry, bitten into the walls of the Notre-Dame de Paris). Pugin’s dreams were rather (to combine our examples) as if the grim ‘Lady of Paris’ were somehow, in infinite detail, duplicated and subsequently, with enormous tackles and scaffold, inverted to be hoist upon its twin, looking for all the world to have been found growing from its own seed upside-down beginning from their crowns – this being that it (the parasitic twin) would terminate in a grandly flat, second and identical basement, though weirdly high above the grey streets of Paris. Returning to our shared stumbling, surrendered within the ever expanding halls of a palatial estate or house: such ventures can be, in no coincidental way, near-exacting in the dire similitude of offering oneself amongst a dense grove in the dimmest twilight or worse, the welled horror loosed alike only, one might have heard, by pearl divers of the orient who, when deep buried within the ocean and by some unfortunate twist or accident to mistaken relinquish that raw and essential knowledge of the navigable that is so essential to orientation as to frantically claw with words, “which way among them all is up?!” Unfortunate as it may sound, it is in such analogy that we may see that ‘place’ can be misunderstood like a slipped or slouched word among many, warranting even the most astute to request a revision of the phrase with a steady arcade of “come again?”, so though a space may be of definite mass, it can be left without effect and consequently reduced in such cases to a lozenge no larger than he who occupies it, both infinite and and completely restrictive. A misunderstood or misgotten space is in no way uncommon and as simple as a cleverly placed mirror that, beyond all attempts at proper concern, will expand a given room by even doubled factors for an eye both direct and otherwise; similarly (and excluding the quite early Greek practice of tapered columns), after the end of the Renaissance’s obsessions with the lucidity of number, there arose more commonly practiced and studied ways in which Michaelangelo, Borromini and other architectural masters were able in their time, with superlative cunning, to, with only conventional vocabulary, deceive direct apperceptions of space by a dweller; likewise, the imaginative ceiling frescoes and plasterwork of Caracci and Mantegna serve the sane visitor just as poorly in the those shown of both a false but limitless sky just above and the hard columns of very rooms they adorn. Pains, however, become abundant for the layman when the historian must remind, with wince and a lowered tone, that those beauties of structural subversion are survived only by the too few remnants of late Renaissance and Baroque archaeologies; a curious question is one that begins ‘what does it say, when said with gibbered words?’ It is with the consideration of the prefaced tediums that the reader would be asked to, by some spasmed award, feign imagine or cull, with that fore lobe of conscious mind, a scene of such clamorous disarray as can be only occasioned during the early increment’s birthing of an exceptionally large estate. If we may, let us try baptize our scene the further with the depths of a blue glow from clear and cloudless June skies buzzing in the heat; some scattered metal’s glint points soft our eyes from a distant sea of bladeless grasses tossed in the throes of the chattering winds; our immediate site is however, stripped clean of that good green to the cracking dirt beneath while, here and there, variously shallow plots lay excised of their meat and left gaping amidst the bare; there are but no persons about save ourselves and an emergent black stalk some ways ahead. This lonesome figure, lean and bent by slight degree, has just scaled, we will notice, with some difficulty, a healthy stack of precisely segmented rock and stone that would still likely serve to complete an architectural foundation and betwixt that lone man and one’s own gaze there is, within a gulf that spans the greater part of a squared kilometer, mass heaps of strewn stone, benches, tackle, and scaffolding, each toppled upon the other in a vast flippant swing humming wide over the barren grounds left spineless for this no doubt ambitious project. [1] The given German word in this case can be literally translated as “weighty” or “of significance.” It is still of some debate as to whether Schwender’s reference to the ‘specificity’ or ‘significance’ of form is, in fact, a younger theoretical sibling of the “signficiant form” believed to have been coined by Clive Bell in his book Art, published in 1914. Schwender offers neither explanation nor repetition of the term in the final published version of Lisette, though the original manuscript purportedly contains the phrase appearing three other times in subsequent chapters. The translators have been understandably cautious about using significant in the place of gerwichtig and have mediated the argument with a second, ancillary adjective, “specific” that adds both the loquacious mien so common of Schwender’s descriptions and likewise serves to offset the dominance of “significant” as a lone qualifier, hopefully easing those who would find the idea of a parallel with Clive Bell to be presumptive or revisionist. [2] (die Startenbitter) The translators have elected to retain the use of starten as a noun.
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It is most assuredly the experience of the reader that, among his myriad days upon the earth, he has at least once well known the elliptical confusion it is to find oneself lost within a building: within matrices of likely verdurous antechambers, vestibules or redundant halls that if not in haste can taunt all but a wan hope of exit; or he may find himself exposed perhaps, within a courtyard, peristyle or likewise negative structure that, cutting its saw-toothed arms black into the pale evening, enfold him to a mere occlusion as it strains, with awkward embrace, to simulate what at one time not long ago was too simply cathected a right of ‘nature’s poesy’. That fabled poesy and the builder’s red pains to reach it can be, quite often, the sole bane that cripples the risen work of the common architect and his tepid, specious stacks of stone to which we so often must turn to live and indwell (innewohnen und wohnen). Our architectures, in their old and multifarious morphs seen fit for living by generations, had (in the past) ever sought to codify the variously truant theories of ‘nature’s germ in form’ into a simpler case that we shall call specific or significant (gewichtig) forms[1]. I mean by such terms to indicate an ideational bond betwixt any two discreet elements of interior and exterior; betwixt inside and out; foundation and elevation; even evidenced in what would be so particular as an axial positioning of relative rooms (as was the case with, in example, late Roman domestic architecture in order that primary entryways would allow but little less than the entrant’s introductory gaze to fall quite squarely on the tablinium). Though if such theories resemble any truth, one may question to which agents of nature might one owe such affects of form? For surely there is some corollary to which all of our architectures have sung in tandem betwixt the calming rule of number and God’s sacred stow of law among the trees and the water; the architect, the prime dweller, otherwise remains forever to one train yoked and driven along the same sad ‘humanist’ tracts as Sangallo or even any of the ancients which he and his peers slavishly shadowed through each turn to a loop, themselves perhaps barely known to be yoked at all.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Excerpt, Chapter 2: Schwender on Misunderstanding Form
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